MVP Code is Never Temporary

Your MVP code is not temporary. It never is.

Founders tell me their first version is a throwaway, something to prove the idea before the real build. I’ve heard it from people working with agencies, from people building on Lovable and Replit, from people with two developers in a spare bedroom. Almost none of them ever throw it away. The moment customers show up, that “temporary” code becomes the thing paying your bills, and nobody rewrites the thing paying the bills.

I spent ten years on one product, a 400,000-line desktop application. Choices made in year one were still shaping what we could build in year ten. Nobody planned for that code to live a decade. It worked, customers depended on it, and working code doesn’t get replaced, it gets extended.

This is why I push back when founders are told architecture is something you do later. I don’t mean the heavyweight version, no six-week design phase, no diagrams for a team of two. I mean the small set of decisions that are expensive to undo: where your data lives, how the pieces of your product are separated, what you’re renting versus what you own. Get those roughly right early and “later” stays affordable. Get them wrong and later becomes a rewrite you’ll never approve, because it stops feature delivery for months while competitors keep shipping.

Assume the code your team writes this quarter will still be running in 2031. What would you want them to do differently starting Monday?

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